VCCircle State Investment Forum Pune Edition will feature the best of Pune Inc. comprising CEOs of India's largest companies, highly successful entrepreneurs and the biggest investors in the country on August 23 at Le Meridien.

The full-day summit will kick-start with a keynote fireside chat with Hanmant Ramdas Gaikwad from BVG India Ltd and M S Unnikrishnan of Thermax Ltd, moderated by VT Bharadwaj from Sequoia Capital. They will map Pune entrepreneurship & deal making market by forging a guidebook for running business successfully out of Pune and giving key inputs that will buoy Pune's entrepreneurial ecosystem.

The three highlights of the summit are solo entrepreneur addresses by Kailash Katkar of Quick Heal Technologies, Mahesh Deshmukh of Chetas Control Systems Private Ltd and Supam Maheshwari of BrainBees Solution Pvt. Ltd (Firstcry). These star entrepreneurs will talk on how they started up, raised funding, chased opportunities and scaled up.

Our panel focused on private equity will shed light on the investor perceptions and highlight key issues tackled by both promoters and investors ranging from valuations, exits, complexities in signing term sheets & lot more issues plaguing the ecosystem. Akhil Awasthi from Tata Capital Growth Fund, Mangesh Pathak of Ambit Pragma and Sandeep Aneja from Kaizen Private Equity will share views on what they look for in a company before investing, in addition to discussing which sectors and stages of a business are of interest to them. On the same panel, Supreet Deshpande, who spun off NovaLead Pharma Pvt Ltd from its parent company, will air views on raising private equity and scaling up significantly.

The special panel on early-stage VC and angel funding, chaired by a prominent angel investor Rehan Yar Khan, with Sanjay Nath of Blume Ventures, Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com, Pradeep Tagare of Intel Capital and Mohit Gundecha of YourNextLeap.com as panelists, will delve into the current market in early-stage investment and angel investment in the country along with the dos & dont’s for the startup entrepreneurs.